Why is no one talking about how senior Labour Party figures whitewash apartheid?

Why is no one talking about how senior Labour Party figures whitewash apartheid?
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
25 February 2022

Amnesty International’s recent report condemning Israel for “committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians” is a damning indictment of the current Israeli government (and its predecessors), and its supporters around the world.

After carrying out research for four years, Amnesty concludes “Israel enforces a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people wherever it has control over their rights”, including Palestinians living in Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and displaced refugees in other countries.

Defining apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of oppression and domination by one racial group over another,” Amnesty explains Israel’s “massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law.” This constitutes a “crime against humanity”, the human rights organisation notes.

Amnesty also has a message to those backing Israel: “governments who continue to supply Israel with arms, and shield it from accountability at the UN are supporting a system of apartheid, undermining the international legal order, and exacerbating the suffering of the Palestinian people.”

The UK does exactly this. In 2018 the Campaign Against Arms Trade exposed how British defence contractors were selling record amounts of arms to Israel, with the UK issuing £221m worth of arms licences to defence companies exporting to Israel. This made Israel the UK’s eighth largest market for UK arms companies, the Guardian reported.

The same year, Mark Curtis, the Editor of Declassified UK, highlighted “consistent British support for Israel internationally, helping to shield it from ostracism”. In 2017 the Foreign Office refused to sign a joint declaration issued at a Paris peace conference on Palestine attended by 70 nations, accusing it of “taking place against the wishes of the Israelis”. And in 2019 the then Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt confirmed the UK would oppose motions criticising rights abuses carried out by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza that are brought to the UN’s Human Rights Council.

While the world’s leading human rights organisation criticising Israel for perpetrating the crime of apartheid is hugely significant, it is important to remember Amnesty is just the latest group to come to this conclusion.

In April 2021 Human Rights Watch declared Israel was committing the crime of apartheid, enforcing the policy to “maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians.” Drawing on years of documentation, analysis of Israeli laws, government planning documents and public statements by officials, the rights organisation concluded Israeli authorities “systematically discriminate against Palestinians” and have adopted policies to counter what it describes as a demographic “threat” from Palestinians.

Similarly, in January 2021 B’Tselem, the leading domestic rights group in Israel, described Israel as an “apartheid regime”.

“One organising principle lies at the base of a wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.” Hagai El-Ad, the group’s director, noted “Israel is not a democracy that has a temporary occupation attached to it. It is one regime between the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and we must look at the full picture and see it for what it is: apartheid.”

Likewise, Yossi Sarid, a former Israeli cabinet minister and longstanding member of Israel’s parliament, said in 2008: “What acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck – it is apartheid.” Famously, former US President Jimmy Carter published his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in 2006, and in 2002 Desmond Tutu, who knew a thing or two about apartheid, told a conference in Boston about a recent visit to the Holy Land and how “it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.”

Though the UK media have studiously avoided making the link, the reports from Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, and the quotes above, have huge ramifications for key figures in the UK Labour Party.

Giving the keynote speech at the November 2021 Labour Friends of Israel’s annual lunch, Keir Starmer noted Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948 “committed the new state to freedom, justice and peace; complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”

“Israel herself is the first to acknowledge that at times she falls short of these goals”, he continued, “But we will continue to support Israel’s rumbustious democracy, its independent judiciary, and its commitment to the rule of law”.

The Labour leader said Labour Party saw their counterparts in the Israeli Labor party “as comrades in the international struggle for equality, peace and freedom”, before quoting Prime Minister Harold Wilson: “social democrats who made the desert flower.”

The assertion it was Israeli pioneers who made the desert bloom repeats one of the founding – and racist – myths of Israel. Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani tweeted why at the time of Starmer’s speech: “The reason why is because it implies it was ‘terra nullius’, nobody’s land, & therefore fine to be appropriated. The story of colonialism.”

Starmer also explained the UK Labour Party does not support the Boycott, Disinvestment and Solidarity campaign against Israel. Why? “Its principles are wrong – targeting alone the world’s sole Jewish state”.

“We believe that international law should be adhered to”, he stated, and therefore Labour “opposes and condemns” illegal settlements, and annexation and the eviction of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Starmer said nothing, of course, about Israel being an apartheid state.

Speaking at a 2017 Jewish News/Bicom Balfour 100 event, Emily Thornberry MP, then Shadow Foreign Secretary, echoed Starmer’s sentiments: Israel “still stands out as a beacon of freedom, equality and democracy, particular in respect of women and LGBT communities, in a region where oppression, discrimination and inequality is too often the norm.”

And speaking at the 2017 Labour Friends of Israel annual dinner, Thornberry praised former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres as “a hero of the left, of the state of Israel and of the cause of peace.”

In contrast, in 2005 US dissident Noam Chomsky called Peres “an iconic mass murderer,” presumably for his role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that led to the creation of Israel and for being Prime Minister when Israel shelled a United Nations compound in Lebanon in 1996, killing over 100 civilians. After conducting an investigation, Amnesty International concluded the attack was intentional.

Labour MP Lisa Nandy excels at smearing critics of Israel. Interviewed on the BBC in early 2020 when she was running to be Labour leader, presenter Andrew Neil asked her about online Labour activist Rachael Cousins, “who’s tweeted calling the Board of Deputies of British Jews Conservative [Party] backers, and demanding that they disassociate themselves from that party, and that they condemn all Israeli military atrocities in the West Bank – her words. Is that anti-Semitic?” Nandy is quick to respond: “Yes.”

And when there were nonviolent protests at the London School of Economics in November 2021 against Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely, Nandy, then Shadow Foreign Secretary, tweeted: “The appalling treatment of Israeli Ambassador @TzipiHotovely is completely unacceptable. There is no excuse for this kind of behaviour. Freedom of speech is a fundamental right and any attempt to silence or intimidate those we disagree with should never be tolerated.”

Reading these quotes in light of all the reports and testimony above is nothing short of shocking. As the American historian Howard Zinn once noted, “The truth is so often the reverse of what has been told us by our culture that we cannot turn our heads far enough around to see it.”

The Labour Party’s code of conduct notes it “will not tolerate racism in any form inside or outside the party” and that “any behaviour or use of language which… undermines Labour’s ability to campaign against any form of racism, is unacceptable conduct within the Labour Party.” Surely, then, the whitewashing of, and apologism for, the racist Israeli apartheid state carried out by Starmer and co. should lead to them being expelled from the Labour Party?

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

Russian Interference in Western Politics? What about Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE?

Russian Interference in Western Politics? What about Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE?
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
3 October 2018

With almost the entire Western media in a constant state of mass hysteria about Russian interference in Western political systems, it’s worth considering some pertinent information largely missing from the debate.

First, it is likely the scale and effectiveness of Russian interventions has been greatly exaggerated. “The simplistic narrative that basically imagines that a bunch of subliterate-in-English trolls posting mostly static and sort of absurd advertising could have influenced American public opinion to such an extent that it fundamentally changed American politics is ridiculous on the face of it”, argued Masha Gessen, a US-Russian journalist and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, when asked about Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election by National Public Radio.

“I feel a lot of pressure… from interviewers and from people to kind of blow up the threat”, said New Yorker’s Adrian Chen – one of the first to write about Russian internet trolls – agreeing with Gessen. “People want to talk about how scary this is, how sophisticated it is. There’s not a lot of room for, you know, just kind of dampening down the issue.”

Turning to the Brexit vote, research by the Oxford Internet Institute looked at 22.6 million tweets sent between March and July 2016, finding just 416 tweets from the Russian Internet Research Agency – the organisation the US Senate says is involved in interfering in Western elections. A second report from the University of Edinburgh discovered 419 accounts operated by the Agency attempting to influence UK politics. However, the study’s lead researcher told the Guardian these 419 accounts tweeted about Brexit a total of just 3,468 times – mostly after the referendum had taken place.

Second, when asked about US claims of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential race, US academic Noam Chomsky replied “My guess is that most of the world is just collapsing in laughter.” Why? Because when it comes to undermining democratic systems Russia is an absolute beginner compared to the United States.

Here is the New York Times in February 2018: “Loch K. Johnson, the dean of American intelligence scholars, who began his career in the 1970s investigating the C.I.A. as a staff member of the Senate’s Church Committee, says Russia’s 2016 operation was simply the cyber-age version of standard United States practice for decades.”

According to a database compiled by political scientist Don Levin from Carnegie Mellon University, the US attempted to influence elections in other countries 81 times between 1946 and 2000. In contrast, he found the Soviet Union/Russia had attempted to sway 36 elections in the same period. Reporting on the database in December 2016, the Los Angeles Times notes the US figure “doesn’t include military coups and regime change efforts following the election of candidates the US didn’t like, notably those in Iran, Guatemala and Chile.”

On top of all this, the evidence clearly shows other nations have exerted a level of influence on Western governments and political systems that Russia could only dream of.

Chomsky again, this time speaking to Democracy Now! in August 2018: “If you’re interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support.”

Chomsky is referring to Israel, whose “intervention in US elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done”, he says. “I mean, even to the point where the Prime Minister of Israel, [Benjamin] Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies” —a reference to Netanyahu’s attempt, in 2015, to destroy the US-led deal to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

Back in the UK, in January 2017 the Middle East Eye reported on “undercover recordings” that “revealed how an Israeli diplomat sought to establish organisations and youth groups to promote Israeli influence inside the opposition Labour party, in an effort to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.” Shai Masot, the Israeli diplomat, said he had helped set up other groups in the UK which, although they presented themselves as independent, received support from the Israeli Embassy.

Israel is not the only Middle East nation who works to undercut Western democracies. In 2006 the Guardian reported that the British government – citing ‘national security’ concerns – had halted a Serious Fraud Office investigation into alleged corruption by the arms company BAE Systems, connected to their dealings with Saudi Arabia. According to the article “In recent weeks, BAE and the Saudi embassy had frantically lobbied the government for the long-running investigation to be discontinued.”

Like its regional ally in Riyadh, the United Arab Emirates has also been busy, carrying out an “intense lobbying campaign… over the last few years” in the UK, according to a new Spinwatch report. This campaign has “helped shape UK government policy towards Muslims at home, and UK and US foreign policy in the Middle East”.

This “massive” PR effort by the corporate-friendly Gulf dictatorship appears to have “had the desired effect”, Spinwatch notes. “With pressure building on Downing Street… the Emiratis pulled off” a “spectacular lobbying success… in March 2014, [British Prime Minister David] Cameron, out of almost nowhere, announced a review into the Muslim Brotherhood” – a useful folk devil for the UAE government.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have also been trying to influence the heart of global power in Washington. For example, the Associated Press noted the diplomatic crisis between Qatar and the UAE that started in June 2017 “ignited a multimillion-dollar battle for influence” with the two rivals spending “heavily over the last year on lawyers, lobbyists, public relations and advertising to seek better trade and security relationships with the United States”.

In a March 2018 article the New York Times reported on “an active effort to cultivate President Trump on behalf of the two oil-rich Arab monarchies” UAE and Saudi Arabia. The aim? “Pushing the White House to remove Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson” and “backing confrontational approaches to Iran and Qatar” – something Tillerson was seen as a block on.

This lobbying seems to have achieved one of its goals, with the New York Times’s Roger Cohen revealing that a European ambassador had told him about a December 2017 dinner party in Washington he attended along with Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner and UAE Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba. After the ambassador had complained to Kushner that his nation’s foreign minister was having difficulty organising a meeting with Tillerson, apparently Otaiba said “Things will be much better when Mike’s installed.” Tillerson was sacked four months later, replaced by CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

What all this confirms is that media reporting and commentary is largely framed by the concerns of the governing elite. Which explains the difference in the size and tone of coverage – Russia has been designated an Official Enemy of the West, while Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE are close allies. However, it is important to separate the interests of Western elites and those of the general population. So while it is obvious why the British elite would want a close ties with the authoritarian monarchies in the Gulf, it is difficult to see what the British public get out of these unholy associations.

The obsessive focus on Russian interference serves a couple of important functions. First, as highlighted above, it hides inconvenient but important truths – that many of our so-called allies are carrying out sophisticated and long-running campaigns to undermine the will of Western publics. And second, it acts as a displacement activity – instead of looking at the deep-seated domestic reasons behind Trump’s victory and why the UK voted for Brexit we continue to be fixated on the all-powerful evil Disney villain Putin.

As always, to see through the fog of propaganda and gain an accurate understanding of the world citizens need to be careful and critical consumers of the mainstream corporate news, making sure to combine their intake with a healthy dose of alternative and independent media.

Ian Sinclair tweets at @IanJSinclair

Antisemitism and the Labour Party: Rebecca Ruth Gould interview

Antisemitism and the Labour Party: Rebecca Ruth Gould interview
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
3 September 2018

Last month Professor Rebecca Ruth Gould from the University of Birmingham published an article titled ‘Legal Form and Legal Legitimacy: The IHRA Definition of Antisemitism as a Case Study in Censored Speech’ in the peer-reviewed academic journal Law, Culture and the Humanities – “the first extended scholarly treatment of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s new definition of antisemitism”.

Ian Sinclair: The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland has referred to “Labour’s failure to adopt the full text of the near universally accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.” Does this characterisation concur with your research?

Rebecca Ruth Gould: Freedland’s claims are misleading and inaccurate. The leading American-Jewish newspaper, The Forward, offers a very different account of the IHRA’s status within the Jewish community. In its pages, the IHRA (both the organization and the definition) has been described as “worthy of outrage,” by Lev Golyakin, who also points out that over a fifth of the 31 IHRA’s member countries “are currently engaged in outright glorification of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust distortion and/or denial.” Why should anyone take guidance from an organisation that collaborates with the rightwing governments of Hungary, Lithuania, and Romania, which have recently been engaged in whitewashing their role in the Holocaust? Yair Wallach has further shown in Haaretz, Israel’s leading liberal newspaper, that the IHRA definition is useless for addressing antisemitism due to its failure to engage with structural racism.  Finally, Freedland’s reference to the “full text” is misleading. During the IHRA delegate meeting in 2016, the examples were determined to be advisory, and not part of the full definition itself. Yet Freedland, along with many other UK commentators, erroneously refers to the “full text” as if that included the examples. This conflicts with the IHRA’s own position. While it is true that the definition has been adopted by all IHRA member states by virtue of their membership, the “full text” of the definition from the point of view of the IHRA and its member states is precisely the two-sentence definition and not the examples, as the press release makes clear when it states “the following examples may serve as illustrations.”

The recent weaponisation of the IHRA definition is itself conducive to antisemitism. It falsely suggests that there is a consensus among Jews around this document and its uses, and that all Jews oppose criticism of Israel, when in fact the most intense and significant criticism of human rights violations by the state of Israel generally comes from Jewish scholars, NGOs, activists, and lawyers, who oppose the ways in which this nation-state presumes to speak on their behalf and in their name when it discriminates against Palestinians.

IS: What effect has the IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism had on civil society and public debate in the UK?

RRG: Increased censorship, within the mainstream media and on university campuses (the focus on my article), has been the most notable effect. Antisemitism experts and scholars like Brian Klug, David Feldman, Stephen Sedley, Anthony Lerman, Rachel Shabi, Kenneth Stern, Adam Wagner, have made important contributions to the debate, but their voices are drowned out by a headline-hungry media. These individuals do not represent a consensus; they have written in various ways about the definition and about antisemitism more generally. In some cases, they support the use of the IHRA definition for specific purposes (such as the classification of hate crimes by the police), but in most cases, they oppose its adoption for the purpose of censoring speech. I don’t agree with them on all particulars, but I respect their voices. They speak from multiple sides of the debate, and their voices should be heard.

And yet their wise, intelligent, and discerning words have not been given a platform in the same way as have more narrow-minded commentators like Jonathan Arkush and Jonathan Freedland. To its shame, The Guardian (a newspaper that has led the way in exposing the injustice of the UK immigration regime) has refused to recognize non-Zionist Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Labour in their coverage and has contributed significantly to the false narrative of consensus around the IHRA definition. I should note in fairness that The Guardian has good coverage of human rights violations in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, but its coverage of the issue of antisemitism in the Labour Party has been appallingly one-sided.

Just as non-Zionist Jews have been silenced in this debate, so too have the voices of Palestinians and their supporters. While BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) groups recently published a letter noting their concerns with the document, they have generally been denied a platform to express their views in mainstream media outlets. And yet the proposal to ban anti-Israel speech affects them too. The adoption of the IHRA examples would send a message that the “right to self-determination” of the Jewish people (as stipulated in the examples) is sacrosanct in ways that rights for Palestinians are not, and that Jewish rights matter more than the rights of other ethnic minorities. Minimally, this a double standard. Maximally, it is prejudice that seeks to be enshrined in law. Although the working definition has no legal status, my article shows how it has been interpreted in UK university contexts as if it were a law. Notably, proposals targeting Islamophobic speech have not received the same airtime in mainstream media outlets. I would oppose those too, because censoring speech is inconsistent with democracy.

IS: What advice would you give to organisations, such as the Labour Party, which are considering – or are in the process of – adopting the IHRA working definition and examples?

RRG: The first thing that must be said in any consideration about how a European political party ought to address antisemitism is that Europe’s history of antisemitism and role in the genocide of the Jewish people means that the dangers of antisemitism will always need to be given serious consideration. Just as every accusation of sexual harassment should be taken seriously, complaints of antisemitism must be treated with empathy and open-minded inquiry, even in cases of intense political disagreement. In a political context that is witnessing the ascendancy of rightwing neo-Nazism across Europe (in Sweden, Denmark, Austria, and Germany) we cannot afford to trivialise antisemitism, even as we rightly resist its weaponisation. Antisemitism is so deeply implicated in European history that it is hardly surprising if the discourse around Israel has in certain ways exacerbated antisemitism.

I don’t therefore support those who deny that there is any antisemitism in the Labour Party. Labour has nothing to gain by taking such a position. There is always room for self-education and self-critique. But we need to move beyond the idea that policing speech is an adequate solution, or that the best way to respond to politically-motivated pressure (which has less to do with Israel than with factions within the Labour Party, many of which are not Jewish) is to concede to it. If we allow one political faction to determine whether criticism of Israel is to be understood as antisemitic, where do such concessions end? Do we also allow radical Islamists to determine what criticism of Islam should be considered Islamophobic? In my view, concessions to specific groups who ask for censorship is never helpful.

Labour must recognize the internal diversity of the Jewish community, and not allow a political faction to silence other points of view, as is happening now to an unprecedented degree. Adoption of the IHRA definition will harm Palestinians and the Palestinian cause; it will also harm non-Zionist Jews, as can be seen from the attempted expulsion of Professor Moshe Machover from the Labour party on the grounds of his violation of the IHRA definition, and the strong opposition that the definition has faced from Jews whose political convictions differ from the Board of Deputies.

I think Corbyn should publicly consolidate his ties with Jewish Voice for Labour and the Jewish Socialist Group. Of course, not all of his critics will be satisfied by that, but such is the nature of politics. Corbyn should also discourage the demonization of any country or political faction, including Israel and Zionists. Above all, we must not be distracted from the struggle for global justice by this domestic political fight.

The Alice in Wonderland nature of the Labour Party anti-semitism controversy

The Alice in Wonderland nature of the Labour Party anti-semitism controversy
by Ian Sinclair
Medium
12 July 2018

Over the last few months the mainstream media coverage about anti-semitism and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has reached Alice in Wonderland proportions.

How surreal, you ask? Here are a few examples.

Despite the Labour leader having a decades long record of anti-racist work and repeating ad nauseam that he condemns anti-semitism, in April 2018 Tory Home Secretary Sajid Javid “urged the Labour leader to ‘once and for all’ clarify his opposition to antisemitism”, the Guardian reported. The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland tweeted that claiming any Jewish person or organisation is “exaggerating or ‘weaponising’ [charges of anti-semitism against Corbyn and Labour]… is itself anti-semitic”. Not to be outdone, Jonathan Arkush, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, “said he would also like action to be taken against those who minimise reports of antisemitism”, including Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey, according to the Guardian.

Frustratingly, some on the Left have been sucked into this ludicrous, often hysterical framing. Asked why anti-semitism was “endemic in the Labour Party” by the BBC’s Andrew Neil, the Corbyn supporting Co-Founder of Novara Media Aaron Bastani didn’t question whether it really was “endemic” but answered “I think there are a few explanations”. Similarly, on Frankie Boyle’s BBC show New World Order invited guest comedian David Baddiel mused “Who knows if Jeremy himself is anti-semitic?” Before this he quipped “He [Corbyn] does say there is no room in the Labour Party for anti-semites. And that might be because it’s full.”

Let me be crystal clear. The evidence shows there is a problem with anti-semitism in the Labour Party and on the broader Left. However, the relentless hounding of Corbyn on anti-semitism is based on a number of erroneous, evidence-free assumptions: that it is widespread in the Labour Party; that it is worse in the Labour Party and the Left than on other parts of the political spectrum; and that the problem has worsened under Corbyn.

Analysing polling data a September 2017 report from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (IJPR) found “the political left, captured by voting intention or actual voting for Labour, appears in these surveys as a more Jewish-friendly, or neutral, segment of the population.” Interestingly, the IJPR went on to note “the absence of clear signs of negativity towards Jews on the political left” was “particularly curious in the current context” as there were “perceptions among some Jews of growing left-wing anti-semitism.”

“Despite significant press and public attention on the Labour Party” a October 2016 Home Affairs Committee report on anti-semitism found “there exists no reliable, empirical evidence to support the notion that there is a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party.”

Analysing YouGov polling data from 2015 and 2017, in March 2018 Evolve Politics website noted “anti-semitic views amongst Labour party voters have actually reduced substantially” since Corbyn was elected leader. Moreover, the report highlights the Tories and UKIP “have a far bigger problem with their voters agreeing with anti-semitic statements.”

Though the survey evidence is for Labour voters rather than members of the Labour Party, it still provides a valuable corrective to the dominant narrative, I think.

The warped nature of the debate is evidenced by the two high profile cases of supposed anti-semitism — activist Marc Wadsworth and former London mayor Ken Livingstone.

Speaking at the June 2016 launch of the Chakrabarti Inquiry report into allegations of anti-semitism in the Labour Party, Wadsworth accused Ruth Smeeth MP of “working hand in hand” with the Daily Telegraph — something Smeeth and her supporters labelled anti-semitic. Wadsworth has said he wasn’t aware Smeeth was Jewish. But even if he was aware, how, exactly, is referring to her alleged links with a right-wing newspaper anti-semitic?

A couple of months earlier, Livingstone did a live radio interview about allegations Labour MP Naz Shah was anti-semitic. “Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism. This was before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”, Livingstone noted, somewhat off topic.

After the interview Labour MP John Mann famously confronted Livingstone on television, calling him a “lying racist” and “Nazi apologist”, and accusing him of “rewriting history”.

Livingstone and Wadsworth have both been forced out of the party.

However, discussing the controversy in an Open Democracy interview, the American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein noted “Livingstone maybe wasn’t precise enough, and lacked nuance. But he does know something about that dark chapter in history.”

The work of Francis Nicosia, the Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont, confirms Livingstone’s comments, though insensitive and unhelpful (including for Corbyn), were broadly correct. “Throughout the 1930s, as part of the regime’s determination to force Jews to leave Germany, there was almost unanimous support in German government and Nazi party circles for promoting Zionism among German Jews”, the academic noted in his book Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. Indeed, Nicosia notes a formal agreement — the Haavara Transfer Agreement — was signed between the Zionist movement and Nazi government in 1933, “facilitating Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine by allowing Jewish immigrants to Palestine to take a small portion of their assets with them.”

The Nazi government’s support for Zionism, of course, was not sincere but “temporary”, “largely superficial” and instrumental, Nicosia explains. And the relationship between Zionist organisations and the Nazis was obviously “not one of mutual respect and cooperation between equals” but something forced on the Jewish population by the most unfavourable of circumstances. With these caveats in mind, the historical fact, however inconvenient, remains: the Nazis, for their own interests, broadly supported Zionism in the 1930s.

When considering the controversy, it is important to understand two things. First, as I have already noted, there is a real problem of anti-semitism on the Left that needs to be addressed. Second, anti-semitism is being used by opponents of Corbyn inside and outside of the Labour Party to undermine his leadership. More broadly, anti-semitism is being weaponised in an attempt to neuter criticism of Israel, and to minimise the ability of a future Corbyn government to support Palestinian rights and criticise Israel. As Daniel Finn notes in his superb April 2018 Jacobin magazine article: “There is nobody in such close proximity to power in a major Western state with a comparable record for Palestinian rights.”

This contextual reading is validated by Tory-supporting Arkush’s recent assertion that Corbyn holds “anti-Semitic views”.

“He was a chairman of Stop the War, which is responsible for some of the worst anti-Israel discourse”, Arkush said, giving the game away.

The intense political pressure created by this media-driven shit-storm has put the Labour leadership in a very difficult position — made worse by Corbyn’s own stupid 2012 comments on Facebook about the removal of an anti-semitic mural. However, the leadership has arguably been too defensive, which though it might make short-term tactical sense, is likely storing up problems for the future.

Rather than capitulate, Project Corbyn needs to do three things. First, be clear there is a problem with anti-semitism in the Labour Party and on the broader Left, and deal with any accusations swiftly, effectively and, most of all, fairly. Second, follow Owen Jones’s suggestion of carrying out a wide-ranging, class conscious political education programme to combat conspiratorial thinking. And third, it needs to stand up firmly and unapologetically to any bogus claims of anti-semitism being made for nakedly political purposes.

“It’s a test of the movement’s mettle”, Finn argues. “If we can’t hold the line in defense” on this “we certainly won’t be in any condition to resist the pressure that is still to come”, he writes. “Across a whole range of issues, from the Saudi war in Yemen to the privatization of the NHS, the ability to hold up under heavy fire will be essential. Things are going to get a lot harder. If we start retreating now, sooner or later there won’t be anything left to defend.”

It was welcome, therefore, to see Corbyn’s spokesperson give such a robust response to Arkush’s shameful allegations, stating his “attempt to conflate strong criticism of Israeli state policies with antisemitism is wrong and undermines the fight both against antisemitism and for justice for the Palestinians. It should be rejected outright.”

More of this, please.

A behind-the-scenes battle over Labour’s foreign policy

A behind-the-scenes battle over Labour’s foreign policy
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
9 January 2018

Since Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in September 2015, Emily Thornberry has been one of his key allies.

After serving as the shadow secretary of state for defence and shadow secretary of state for exiting the European Union, Thornberry has been shadow foreign secretary since June 2016.

The Islington South and Finsbury MP has proven to be an effective politician, gaining plaudits for her performance at the dispatch box standing in for Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Questions and for ambushing Tory minister Michael Fallon on The Andrew Marr Show about the time he attended a reception with Bashar al-Assad to celebrate the Syrian president winning an election.

However, though they have largely been ignored by Labour supporters and left-wing commentators, Thornberry’s comments last year about Israel are very concerning.

Speaking at a November Jewish News/Bicom Balfour 100 event, she noted Israel “still stands out as a beacon of freedom, equality and democracy, particular in respect of women and LGBT communities, in a region where oppression, discrimination and inequality is too often the norm.”

A December speech she gave at the Labour Friends of Israel annual dinner “could have been written by a pro-Israel lobbyist,” argued Asa Winstanley from Electronic Intifada.

Her statement that it was Israeli “pioneers … who made the deserts bloom” repeated one of the founding and “racist myth[s]” of Israel, Winstanley went on to note.

Amazingly, at the end of the speech she described the former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres as “a hero of the left, of the state of Israel and of the cause of peace.”

In contrast, in 2005, US dissident Noam Chomsky called Peres “an iconic mass murderer,” presumably for his role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that led to the creation of Israel and for being head of government when Israel shelled a United Nations compound in Lebanon in 1996, killing over 100 civilians.

After conducting an investigation, Amnesty International concluded the attack was intentional.

In both speeches Thornberry highlighted the denial of rights to Palestinians in the occupied territories, which makes her statement about Israel being “a beacon of freedom, equality and democracy” all the more laughable.

As the title of a 2015 article in the Independent newspaper by the academic Yara Hawari explained, “Israel is supposedly the only democracy in the Middle East, yet 4.5 million Palestinians under its control can’t vote.”

“The everyday lives of Palestinians [in the West Bank] is controlled by the IOF [Israeli Occupation Forces]. And it is done brutally,” Hawari noted.

“Movement is rigidly controlled, access to resources is denied and Israeli military incursions into villages and towns are frequent.

“Palestinians see violent settler rampages on a daily basis, which often involve the burning of agricultural land and physical assaults on anyone who gets in their way.”

Famously, former US president Jimmy Carter labelled the Israeli occupation an example of “apartheid.”

Michael Lynk, the UN rapporteur for human rights in the occupied territories, recently noted the “suffocating economic and travel blockade” Israel maintains “has driven Gaza back to the dark ages,” with “more than 60 per cent of the population of Gaza … reliant upon humanitarian aid.”

Israel is a “settler colonial state that flouts international law on a daily basis by oppressing the Palestinians in varying states of occupation,” Hawari concluded.

“And it does so with European and American complicity. The shining beacon of democracy in the Middle East? Far from it.”

Thornberry’s remarks aren’t that surprising if you consider her political career.

Until Corbyn won the Labour leadership, her politics and voting record fit comfortably with the more liberal, often interventionist, section of the British Establishment.

She was, as the New Statesman reported in 2016, “one of [Ed] Miliband’s inner circle.” As shadow attorney general, she voted for Britain’s disastrous military intervention in Libya in 2011 and, in 2014, for Britain to conduct air strikes on Isis in Iraq.

Turning to domestic politics, she abstained on the 2013 vote about the coalition government’s Workfare programme, the scheme in which people on Jobseeker’s Allowance are forced to carry out unpaid work in order to keep receiving their benefits.

And she abstained again on the 2015 vote for the Welfare Bill, which leaked government figures showed would push 40,000 more children below the poverty line. As Tony Benn used to say, politicians can be divided into two categories, signposts and weathercocks.

Thornberry’s politics are important because, as Dr David Wearing noted last year, the “anti-militarist and anti-imperialist” Corbyn “has a real chance of being our next prime minister.”

“Not only is that new in Britain, I think it’s new internationally,” the teaching fellow in international relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, explained in a Media Democracy podcast.

“I can’t think of any time in the last several decades where it has been a realistic possibility that the leader of a UN security council permanent member, a great power, a great capitalist Western power, could be in the next few years an anti-militarist and an anti-imperialist. I don’t think there is a precedent for that. So it’s really huge. It’s a challenge to the foreign policy elite, it’s a challenge to conventional wisdom.”

At the same time, writing in June 2017, British historian Mark Curtis noted that, although Labour’s general election manifesto made “several clear breaks from current UK foreign policy,” there was also evidence that, “if the manifesto is implemented in its current form, it is likely to still promote extremism in UK foreign policy” (Curtis considers much of Britain’s bipartisan post-1945 foreign policy to be extreme).

Curtis highlights pledges to “support development and innovation” in the defence industry and maintain the Tories’ 2 per cent military spending commitment, along with half-hearted statements on the so-called “special relationship” with the US, international development and Israel-Palestine.

Incidentally, Curtis described Thornberry’s “positioning” on foreign affairs in an October 2017 interview she did with Middle East Eye as “basically Blairite.”

There is, then, a battle over the nature of Labour’s foreign policy — not least over Trident nuclear weapons — within the Parliamentary Labour Party, of course, but also within the shadow cabinet and probably within Corbyn’s core circle itself.

This ongoing struggle probably provides the context behind the Guardian’s recent feature-length interview with Thornberry, with the liberal organ taking the unusual step of advertising the interview over a week before it appeared in the newspaper.

Why? As the interviewer noted, Thornberry is “widely tipped to be the party’s next leader,” but after Corbyn led Labour’s extraordinary general election campaign, direct assaults on his leadership, like the attempted coup in 2016, are no longer viable.

The Guardian’s promotion of Thornberry may well herald a switch to a subtler, longer-term strategy that looks ahead to the next Labour leadership contest.

After all, Jezza isn’t getting any younger. Thornberry is the perfect candidate for Guardian “centrist” types who would like to neuter Corbynism — someone who can gain the backing of significant numbers of Corbyn supporters while at the same time diluting the movement’s relative radicalism by returning the Labour Party to safer, Establishment-friendly ground.

With all this in mind, it is important that all those who want to see an anti-imperialist, humane and sane British foreign policy raise their voices against Thornberry when she glosses over Israel’s abysmal human rights record and tacks too closely to the Establishment line.

The basic tenets of Labour’s foreign policy need to be argued about, settled and publicised right now, rather than being fought over in office under intense pressure from the media, military and opposing political parties.

Remaining silent — perhaps in the belief that criticising Thornberry will weaken Corbyn — is surely short-term politicking that will only increase the chances of Corbyn’s Labour Party disappointing if it gains power.

‘A Fantastic Foreign Secretary’? William Hague Leaves Office

‘A Fantastic Foreign Secretary’? William Hague Leaves Office
by Ian Sinclair
Huffington Post
21 July 2014

You’ll have heard, of course, of the maxim “Don’t speak ill of the dead”. However, you are probably less familiar with the media’s recent modification to this: “Don’t speak ill of the recently departed Foreign Secretary”.

Over at the Financial Times political commentator Janan Ganesh noted William Hague, who announced he was stepping down as Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs last week, “has hardly erred” since taking over the Foreign Office in 2010. “Nobody disputes his technical competence, his facility with a brief, his easy but authoritative style of management”, explained Ganesh.

The Guardian’s Diplomatic Editor Julian Borger reported that Hague had “suffered early setbacks but emerged at the end of it as a pioneering campaigner in partnership with one of the most glamorous film stars on the planet.” Indeed, Borger devotes over half of his article’s 756 words to Hague’s work with film star Angelina Jolie on sexual violence. And the “early setbacks”? That would be the rumours of Hague having an affair with his assistant and the incident when planes broke down trying to rescue British citizens from Libya.

Perhaps most shocking of all, Zara Taylor-Jackson, UNICEF UK’s Government Relations Manager, tweeted that Hague “has been a fantastic Foreign Secretary. He’s shown remarkable leadership in his efforts to end sexual violence in conflict.”

What these three responses to Hague’s resignation reveal is that propaganda is just as much about what is left out as what is actually stated.

So all three failed to mention that Hague was a key player in the NATO attack on Libya in 2011. The West quickly overstepped the United Nations resolution, escalating the level of violence and number of dead and arguably fanning the flames of conflict into Mali. Today Libya is in a state of perpetual violent crisis, with rival militias fighting over Tripoli’s international airport in the past week.

They also failed to mention Hague’s role in pushing for war in Syria in August 2013, a course of action that would have increased the level of violence and dead, according to such anti-war liberal pinkos as two former NATO Secretary-Generals and Yacoub El Hillo, the highest ranking UN humanitarian official in Syria at the time.

They also failed to mention Hague’s involvement in the continuing US-NATO military occupation of Afghanistan. Last week the United Nations reported civilian casualties in Afghanistan had surged 24 percent in the first half of the year – their highest levels since 2009.

They also failed to mention Hague’s role in standing with Bahrain’s rulers in opposition to democracy and human rights, and how Hague continued the long-standing British policy of supporting the other Gulf autocracies of Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE, overseeing billions of dollars of arms sales to these undemocratic governments.

They also failed to mention that while Hague has been foreign secretary Britain has armed Israel and provided cast-iron support to Israel as it attacks the “prison camp” of Gaza.

And finally they also failed to mention how Hague has given his support to the murderous US ‘war on terror’ and all that entails – drones attacks on seven nations, US special forces operations across the world, extraordinary rendition and the US prisons in Bagram and Guantanamo.

All this is not to single out Hague as especially bad or evil – he is simply fulfilling his role as British Foreign Secretary. If he had thought or acted differently he would never have risen so high in the British political elite. As the historian Mark Curtis explained in his 1995 book The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 “Rather than occasionally deviating from the promotion of peace, democracy, human rights and economic development in the Third World, British foreign policy has been systematically opposed to them, whether the Conservatives or Labour have been in power.”

However, I would argue that writing an assessment of Hague’s time as Foreign Secretary and not mentioning any of these significant global events displays an extraordinary level of internalised establishment-friendly thinking – something huge chunks of the British media seem to excel at. As Curtis said in his 2003 book Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World, “The British liberal intelligentsia generally displays its servitude to the powers that be rather than to ordinary people, whether here or abroad.”